Mammoth team digs for help, funds

For price of tuition, willing bodies can join

By TOM PAULSON, P-I REPORTER

Updated
9:00 pm PST, Friday, March 31, 2006

A mammoth that likely died about 16,000 years ago northeast of what is now Yakima is slowly giving up its secrets, scientists reported Friday at a meeting in Seattle, and anybody interested in assisting with the next phases of excavation and study is more than welcome to join up.

Anybody willing to get dirty and put money down, that is.

You would think that the discovery of a skeleton of one of the grandest creatures of the Pleistocene period in the Pacific Northwest would shake money out of those research agencies that seem happy to pay scientists to do other things, such as study the genes of some weird bacterium or determine why teenagers watch television. But then, you would not understand what it's like to be a paleontologist or an archaeologist.

"It's a pretty cool find," said Patrick Lubinski, a Central Washington University archaeologist and lead scientist of the Wenas Creek Mammoth project. An upper foreleg bone, or humerus, dug out of a road cut in March 2005 launched the project.

Mammoth bones have been discovered before, Lubinski noted. But most of them have been fragments washed down during one of the massive prehistoric regional floods that repeatedly swept across the Columbia Basin at the close of the Ice Age.

This mammoth, Lubinski said, was found on a ranch outside the small community of Selah, in an area outside the prehistoric flood zones.

"We know it wasn't washed in, that it was a local mammoth," he said. Lubinski hopes to eventually discover that it is an intact mammoth.

"If it is, that would be pretty rare," said University of Washington paleontologist Bax Barton, who is working with Lubinski. He is studying the soil found around the bones for what it might reveal about the prehistoric environment -- and perhaps changes in climate.

At the first dig last summer, the scientists and nine students recovered both the right and left forelegs along with a wrist bone. CWU geologist Karl Lillquist helped establish that the mammoth bones were deposited on top of creek gravel and then buried by a mudslide.

Samples of the bone were sent to various labs for radiocarbon dating to narrow down the age. Lubinski says it's likely about 16,000 years old, but not all the data are in.

Soil samples are being analyzed as well to help with the dating, using a relatively new technique that actually measures the quantity of trapped electrons in soil atoms.

But lack of funding is a chronic problem. The team has gone $60,000 over budget and likely needs at least $300,000 more to complete the study of this potentially rare find.

From June 19 to Aug. 11, anyone interested in paying the $2,300 tuition can help the CWU team excavate more of the Wenas mammoth and gain hands-on knowledge about how scientists peel back the mysteries of prehistoric life in the Northwest.

If digging and sifting dirt under the hot sun for a few months aren't enough to tempt you, participants will also engage in mapping, lab work, skeletal anatomy studies and many other aspects of bona fide paleontology, geology and archaeology.